Imagine designing amazingly intricate, one-of-a-kind electric guitar bodies years ago - and now wishing you could document your work while you still can.
Then Imagine trying to produce a detailed 3D model of the guitar shown in the image here - with conventional measuring tools. Yep, you'd be there a very long time, and it definitely wouldn't turn out well. In fact, low-end optical scanners couldn't even do the job properly.
Enter GKS, who provided high-precision laser scanning equipment. Their equipment can scan as many as 75,000 points per second at a resolution of as low as 0.005mm. after three hours of scanning. they had a monstrous amount of data describing all the nooks and crannies of this groovy item. But that wasn't the end of it: they had to do another three hours of model cleanup to produce a tidy 3D model suitable for printing on a CNC machine.
After half an hour on the CNC machine, a duplicate was ready - made of a "rare mahogany wood". Evidently 36 copies are planned.